Kipling on Baja California's Jersey Shore
I missed the big blizzard. I was on a beach in Cabo San Lucas sipping a margarita and dozing over Kipling's The City of Dreadful Night. I still can't decide if bringing the balladeer of the meeting between the white folks and the brown was an inspired choice for a Mexico trip, or just a cliched one. n We'd skated out of New York just ahead of the snow, flying first to Los Angeles to visit family in Pacific
"A gusty wind just blew up out of the canyon and is trembling the lemons on the little tree that grows out of the slope just below me. If I want to make ice tea, all I'll have to do is hook a branch with this little bungee cord, draw the branch near, and snip off the ripest-looking lemon with this pair of scissors. I love L.A."
On the Saturday night before New Year's Diane and I drove east across town to Los Feliz to have dinner at the home of Lucian Truscott. He lives in a huge 1921 white Tudor that was a steal when he bought it several years ago, before Madonna bought one nearby and gave the aging (by L.A. standards) neighborhood a new coat of hip. The ground floor is all vast, open rooms puzzled together. There's a nice backyard, two garages and a clear view of downtown L.A. looking vaguely sinister out back.
We had a wonderful time with Lucian's six-year-old daughter Lilly, his mother-in-law Carolyn, in from Magee, MS, for the holidays, and his wife, also Carolyn. (They go by "Big Carolyn" and "Little Carolyn.") Big Carolyn and I clinked tumblers of Jack Daniel's and discussed the vicissitudes of her living in a dry county. Lilly played the piano and danced and told jokes and gave us a house tour and was completely charming. By the time she's seven she'll be a published author: she and Lucian have written a children's book together, Itty Bitty Baby, that Random House is publishing next year.
Lucian was in full domestic mode, padding around the kitchen, mixing the ladies New Orleans-style Ramos gin fizzes, whomping up a cream of mushroom soup with white truffle zabaglione, a salad with mimosa vinaigrette, veal chops and homemade vanilla bean ice cream with berries. Carolyn has great taste in bad antiques; I mean a taste for bizarre old things, which I happen to share. I especially liked the repeated monkey motif?a stuffed monkey she bought at the Portobello Road flea market, painted panels where monkeys in fancy dress dance and ride in carriages, a guest bathroom done up entirely in a monkeys-in-the-jungle design. I was amazed to hear that she's never been to the Monkey Bar in all the times she's visited to New York. We made a date for next time.
New Year's Day we drove down to see Joachim Blunck's new house in Westchester, a Beaver Cleaver neighborhood surprisingly tucked between LAX and the sea. JB has designed every incarnation of New York Press, but his bread and butter for years now has been tv production. He's got a little production facility set up in the garage in his backyard. He showed us what he was working on, the title graphics and bumpers for a Court TV miniseries documentary on porn produced by Burt Kearns, author of Tabloid Baby, with narration by Legs McNeil.
After New Year's we flew to Los Cabos. Alaska Airlines, with the slab of pound cake and mini-Snickers it served us as a snack, inserted a little prayer card with a quote from the Psalms: "I will praise God's name in song/and glorify Him with thanksgiving." I suddenly remembered that it was almost exactly a year earlier that an Alaska MD-80 shuttling between Mexico and Seattle went down with all passengers and crew. It was a bit unnerving to know now that they say a little prayer every time they fly.
Los Cabos is at the very southern tip of Baja California, where the desert meets the Sea of Cortez and the Sea of Cortez meets the Pacific, 1300 hard, dry kilometers south of San Diego. Los Cabos is basically two little towns, Cabo San Lucas and San Jose del Cabo, separated by 30 km of beautiful coastline, all white beaches and half-moon bays and stony capes, most now with luxury hotels or gated time-share communities squatting on them. It's summery there year-round. The blue waters reflect the blue skies and are filled with marlin for the deep-sea fishers and, in winter, gray whales that've migrated down from the Arctic. There are sea lions on the rocks, and pelicans everywhere, thick as whale lice. They cranked overhead in great prehistoric droves and stood all over any unmanned boat.
They call Los Cabos California's Hamptons, though for downtown Cabos San Lucas, California's Jersey Shore might be more appropriate. It's a dusty, sandy, good-naturedly tawdry little beach town set on a gorgeous wide bay tucked behind the rocks of Land's End, the tip of the peninsula. People who know are quick to tell you that it's not "real" Mexico. It's more like Southernmost California, existing entirely for American tourists, and is largely the work of American and European entrepreneurs. It's a colonial outpost of the white people pleasure dome.
I can't imagine the local Mexicans are too bothered by that. In a country where the minimum wage is $4 a day if you're lucky enough to have a job, they could be doing a lot worse than living off the fat of the tourists. A margarita costs more than $4 in Cabo San Lucas. Your waiter who brought it to you makes more off your table's tip than lots of Mexicans make in a day; in a day he earns what they make in weeks. The first thing tourist workers anywhere learn is how to act like they're really glad to see you, but in Cabo San Lucas it might actually be close to the truth. In one shop we chatted with a twentysomething guy who'd moved to Cabo San Lucas two years ago from Mexico City. When I asked him if he likes living in Cabo, he looked at me like I was mad. "Of course. This is paradise."
Cabo San Lucas is a party town. People go there as they do to New Orleans, to get fucked up and act out. This culture is clearly conveyed when your hotel hands you an ass-pummeling margarita at the front desk before you've even signed in. (It's made with a lot of tequila and Damiana instead of Triple Sec, and poured over crushed ice. Diane nursed hers for three days.) At lunch, when you order a cerveza they bring you a second one, on ice, and you drink them both, because it's hot out and you're dry and it's your vacation. One of the most successful businesses in Cabo San Lucas is the nightclub Cabo Wabo, owned by Sammy Hagar. As in the Van Halen paean to drunkenness, "Cabo Wabo." Sammy spends six months a year there. He should run for mayor.
People go to Cabo San Lucas to lie on the beach all day, or go deep-sea fishing, or play some golf. When it gets dark you go to dinner, then fire up a fat Cuban cigar, then start pounding the tequilas and the jello shots at Cabo Wabo or El Squid Roe or the couple of strip joints. You party all night, hang over the barrel all morning, and by lunchtime, as the sobriety wagon passes you by on the way to another guy's table down the beach, you salute it with the first couple of cervezas of the afternoon. It made me a little edgy to be around so much amateur alcoholism, as it does on St. Patrick's Day or Bourbon St. I prefer to drink among regular and professional tipplers. Amateurs cutting loose drink with a steely determination to get hammered, to say and do things they never would otherwise, whereas for your regular it's more of a management style. I get spooked among people who drink to get crazy. I'm more used to people who drink to get right.
We took a sunset cruise on a little catamaran and chased a trio of gray whales across the bay, the sun setting behind us firing the surface of the water a blazing pinkish orange. The catamaran snuck up behind them to within maybe 30 feet, close enough you could almost feel the hum of the vast organic engines inside them processing all that plankton and propelling all that bulk so casually through the waves as they lifted their brows and blew their geysers and curled their spines and finally flipped their white-bottomed tales up into the air and slid silent as Poseidon's cart-horses into the water, disappearing in flat, donut-shaped disturbances that lingered like smoke rings on the surface.
Mostly we hung out on the beach under the blazing sun. A waiter from the hotel's beach bar would ferry drinks. Vendors in white strolled the sands hawking inferior silver, carvings, t-shirts with stupid sayings on them, serapes, those straw hats middle-aged beach tourists like to wear. For a few bucks, beautiful brown Indian ladies would braid cornrows into the hair of bleached-blonde California princesses. At The Office, a shack of a bar-restaurant with tables right in the sand, a guitar-strummer strolled. "Hi, romantic guys," he smiled to every couple. Big white cruise ships smoked into the bay every morning and decanted launch after launch of Americans, who'd go up into the little town to buy trinkets.
And I dozed over Kipling. It was a volume from my father's shelves wherein I remember reading some of the "Barrack-Room Ballads" as a kid?The Works of Rudyard Kipling, a fake-leatherbound edition from P.F. Collier & Son. The copyright page has fallen out; I'm guessing it's from the 1940s (Kipling died in '36). I remember it was part of a set; I think Conan Doyle and John Greenleaf Whittier were among it.
I'm not the biggest Kipling fan. The poetry's ingratiating doggerel, and much as I think "The Man Who Would Be King" is a thumping great yarn, most of his fiction bores me. I'd brought him specifically for his nonfiction travelogue, The City of Dreadful Night. (This Collier edition has it as "City of the Dreadful Night," an odd mistake, given that Kipling borrowed the title from the morbid Victorian poet James Thomson, and it has in turn been nicked from him several times since.) It's a scathing portrait of Calcutta, with a few other towns thrown in, published in 1890. I knew it only by ill repute as a classic colonialist, jingoist, racist tract. It is all those things, but also an excellent window on the Raj in full bloom. Kipling's offering you a chance to crawl inside a British colonial's head and view India through his eyes. That's a great history lesson, though I don't suppose it's often taught.
Kipling dwells much on how colonials should comport themselves in the presence of the natives and "savages," as in: "Then the secret of the insolence of Calcutta is made plain. Small wonder the natives fail to respect the Sahib, seeing what they see and knowing what they know. In the good old days, the honorable the directors deported him or her who misbehaved grossly, and the white man preserved his izzat [which I'm guessing is dignity]. He may have been a ruffian, but he was a ruffian on a large scale. He did not sink in the presence of the people. The natives are quite right to take the wall of the Sahib who has been at great pains to prove that he is of the same flesh and blood." I thought about this among some of my braying, drunken fellow Americans.
Kipling complains about what he calls Calcutta's "Awful Smell," which "blackens the face of any Englishman who sniffs it." More generally, he wonders, "What has England to do with Calcutta's evil, and why should Englishmen be forced to wander through mazes of unprofitable argument against men who cannot understand the iniquity of dirt?"
For all that, there are many fine, intimately descriptive travelogue passages?different neighborhoods, the riverfront, the whorehouse district, the train yard, an opium-processing factory. Here he is at a cemetery:
"...The guide-books will tell you when the place was opened and when it was closed. The eye is ready to swear that it is as old as Herculaneum and Pompeii. The tombs are small houses. It is as though we walked down the streets of a town, so tall are they and so closely do they stand?a town shriveled by fire, and scarred by frost and siege. They must have been afraid of their friends rising up before the due time that they weighted them with such cruel mounds of masonry. Strong man, weak woman, or somebody's 'infant son aged fifteen months'?it is all the same. For each the squat obelisk, the defaced classic temple, the cellaret of chunam, or the candlestick of brickwork?the heavy slab, the rusteaten railings, the whopper-jawed cherubs and the apoplectic angels. Men were rich in those days and could afford to put a hundred cubic feet of masonry into the grave of even so humble a person as 'Jno. Clements, Captain of the Country Service, 1820.'"
Then we flew back home where it was cold as hell, and spent the next few days learning to wear clothes again.